• The_v@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 year ago

    Okay boys and girls it’s story time!

    Now there are a few major area of dumbfuckery for farmers: Pesticides, fertilizer, and equipmemt. Around 80% of the stories I hear fall I to these areas.

    Pesticides - the most common area of dumbfuckery.

    First story:

    Around 15 years ago, the operation I worked for hired a new farm manager. We had a murder of around 300 crows and a large colony of California ground squirrels wrecking havoc on our fields.

    The owner blamed what came next on the farm manager but I suspect it was not a unilateral decision on his part. The guy wasn’t that bright. One evening when everyone else was gone for the day, the new farm manager put out a pile of crops and dumped a bunch of Temik on it.

    The next morning hundreds of dead crows and ground squirrels littered the ground. There was also several coyotes, owls, turkey vultures, a few hawks, and a pair of golden eagles.

    I never saw that farm manager again but his next job was in China for some reason. I suspect it was the federal and state warrant for his arrest.

    Fertilizer:

    Now this one I just heard last week. It’s by far the biggest dumbfuckery I have heard for a while.

    It’s a common practice to run fertilizer in irrigation setups, referred to as fertigation. It’s relatively simple to do, all you need an injection port, pump, and tank of liquid fertilizer. It’s also a regulation to have a anti-backflow system to prevent the fertilizer from making its way back to the source and contaminating it.

    Well this dumbfuck farmer had an older irrigation system without the injection setup. Instead paying a few grand to have it installed, he decided to just dump the fertilizer down the well and turn the irrigation system on. Thereby contaminating the aquifer with nitrates and bacteria, both potentially deadly to people drinking the water.

    Equipment: you know all those OSHA regulations written in blood? Heres another one.

    A couple of years ago, I was working with a very large dairy. They have centralized feed system that was automatic. They have augers turning on and off constantly to feed the animals as needed.

    Well one of augers kept getting clogged because of the safety grill around the intake to keep body parts from getting into it. So the dairyman removed the grill.

    Well the day I was there, a new hire who didn’t know the system happened to be standing on top of the feed when the auger turned on.

    She lost her leg.

    The dairyman got a massive fine plus used for millions.